Photographer unknown (image: via creative commons.)
Bonus submission points if you can name the folks in this photograph.
Humble's latest photography open call asks for work in tripped-out forms.
We could position Humble's next open call as a mile marker in the trajectory of American Landscape Photography. The "manifestly destined" photographers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century segueing into The New Topographics of the 1960s, typologists, and generations following them all.
Alexander Binder is a wizard creator of imaginary worlds. Growing up in Germany’s Black Forest in the 1980’s, his pre-internet (and pre-Kanye West) childhood and limited athletic abilities sparked a love for old fairytales, comic books and fantasy literature, as well as science fiction and horror movies. Over the years, these obsessions accumulated into a mental archive of psychedelic stories and imagery, which have had a major influence on his photographic practice for more than a decade. Binder’s upcoming book with Tangerine Press, Kristall ohne Liebe, meaning "The Crystal without Love,” uses various mystical symbols to draw an ongoing tension between competing forces of darkness and light. From a distance, this might sound like the perfect recipe for a late 1990’s mall-goth picture book, but it’s executed with a sensitivity that is smart, thoughtful and aesthetically riveting. And it's even stranger when viewed while listening to Black Sabbath’s N.I.B.
